Monthly Archives: September 2009

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I’ve always wondered how a construction crane lifts itself up when a building gets taller as it is being built. Watch this video, it’s uber cool. But first, turn off your speakers, unless you enjoy loud and annoying techno music.

Please be patient while I do the installation writeup of my CarPC. I just lost a batch of photos because I forgot to back them up when I formatted my computer. So back to taking photos tomorrow. Continue reading →

Gmail’s spam filter is really good, I rarely get spam. But once in a while some spam do get through, and in this case, a widow by the name of Mrs Elvira Ninita requires my help to transfer 5 million dollars. So I decided to do something different:

Her email:

My reply:

Her reply came back a few days later and mentioned nothing about the marriage or the yatch, just bunch of paragraphs about deposits and stuff. I assume that she’s not interested so I dropped the matter:

Too bad, I could have gotten her money and be holidaying in the Maldives, sipping cognac on my very own yatch Continue reading →

With the hardware almost ready, it is time to move everything into the car. The layout here is very important because we’ll be routing extra cables around the car for the monitor, USB and audio. For my setup, I’ll be mounting my PC in the boot.

Step 1: clear the boot.

My boot is always empty because there’s nothing to carry around. Once when I was stopped by security for a “boot check”, the guard commented on how empty it was and that I must be preparing for Raya. I said no, it’s so that I can pack more dead bodies inside yes, of course.

Initially I wanted to put the PC with the casing inside. But the casing itself will take up precious real estate in the boot. Sometimes I may want to transport bikes or large items. So I decided to go for a naked setup.

I stripped everything off the casing and I’m left with this plate that will hold the motherboard in place.

I don’t use my rear speakers so I decided to put them to good use.

The motherboard will be held upside-down by the speaker’s frame. This way, I don’t take up space on the floor.

Once you got your PC’s layout figured out, it’s now time to route the extra cables. It is advisable to route the power cable separately from the other cables to prevent interference. For me, I run the power cable on the left side of the car and the video, audio and USB cable on the right side of the car.

In order to make routing the new cables easier, you should tear apart your interior.

Backseats off. Now is a good time to vacuum those impossible to reach areas.

Cables running from the boot.

I tied the new cables together with the old ones using cable ties. You can get a bunch of these for RM2 at Ace Hardware.

Inverter and controller in place. Circuit requires a bit of modification to work, will update accordingly once I finalize the design. No smoke or fire during power up so everything’s alright.

I finished wiring the car already and I’ve also put the PC into the car for testing. For now I’m having humming noise from the audio, also known as ground loop problem. Probably caused by the inverter. I’ll be getting that fixed hopefully by tomorrow.

I’ve also bought and modified a windshield mount so that it is very rigid and will not shake when the car is moving. It involves injecting hot glue to the various joints that are not tight-fitting enough.

A very rigid windshield mount.

Will update more tomorrow once I solve the ground loop problem and the USB2.0 problem.

Remember my little reverse engineering project on the Nikon Creative Lighting System (CLS) a while back? I’ll be giving a short talk/presentation on that at an upcoming Nikonian Academy Snappy workshop. It’ll be held on the 16th of September and I’ll be showing off some cool things that you can do with Nikon speedlights that you won’t see anywhere else.